So, according to a post made by Shit Reddit Says moderator Dworkin, Rebecca Watson has solicited the help of EXTREMELY anti-/r/atheism subreddit Shit Reddit Says to all go and vote "yes" on a panel she is proposing to host about Reddit at the Austin, TX music festival SXSW.

You may remember Watson from last year's ElevatorGate controversy or you may not; she's famous for not much more than a video she put on YouTube which went viral and in which she claimed she was harassed by a man in an elevator who asked her out to coffee at an atheist convention. Such a ridiculous shit storm was born that Richard Dawkins himself issued public commentary denouncing it.

Yes, Watson is on the panel. She has vociferously supported SRS in the past and is, via proxy, essentially employing them to help her create this panel.... which will NOT be objective. /r/atheism is sure to be slandered considering Watson's previously expressed views about us, and there does not appear to be anyone on the panel there who does not share her views, or at the very least is only soft opposition.

It takes all of five seconds to sign up at the website to vote "yes" or "no" on whether or not this panel should be hosted. It's painless. I've already cast my vote. I'd like to encourage you all to do the same and give this a thumbs down.

This is not really about my dislike of Watson or SRS (although, I am not particularly fond of either of them). This is about fairness. If discussions about Reddit, misogyny and other forms of bigotry on Reddit, and gender inequalities on the internet in general (which seems to be the gist of this panel) are going to take place in public- especially at such a highly visible event, they should be fair. The discussions should actually represent this website and its community. The discussions should feature voices from both sides of the issue and not just be a thinly-veiled smear campaign.

TL; DR: Defend Reddit and /r/atheism. Sign up, vote thumbs down, and stop this smear campaign from happening at one of the biggest music festivals in the country.

EDIT: Spelling.

EDIT 2: Alright folks, in case you're wondering why it's so important we stop this, here goes. Watson wrote an article at her website called "Reddit Makes Me Hate Atheists". About /r/atheism. About you. We want to combat bigotry? Here's our chance. Hatred (her own words) can come from within as easily as from without. Even the fact you're a Redditor is enough to make her hate you, as evidenced by the article and the fact she is extremely pro-SRS and mods one of their subreddits. SRS of course being the group of subreddits that regularly (every day) accuses all Redditors of being pedophiles, misogynists, homophobes, sexists, racists, rapists, rape apologists, ablists, and so on. Does that describe you? No. Me either. Do you want these people circle jerking around a microphone in front of hundreds of people with no one to defend your reputation? No? Me neither.

This is a smear campaign plain and simple, and stopping it has nothing to do with censorship. She has her own publication where she is a full-time journalist. Nobody is trying to censor her there. Either she needs to put together a fair panel that will be able to have a balanced discussion about Reddit and us on the national stage, or we need to do everything we can to stop this event from taking place- she has been guilty of defamation before and that is all this event is about, no matter what pretenses are presented for it.

LOL, so apparently all the butthurts in this thread have forgotten about that little congressional panel recently, which was seen and broadcasted on the national stage about a controversial topic, and was totally stacked with no fair play or opposing views. Remember that one? The one about birth control that featured all men? Whose views were thinly-veiled, hateful rhetoric? Remember the outrage? The calls for boycott?

Not when the effects of the different scenarios you brought up are so disproportionate in harm, scope and influence as to render any such comparisons silly, no, it doesn't. Do you apply the same standards to always requiring people who disagree to be present when watching the news, reading non-fiction or discussing anything normative with friends?

Wut? That's not even close to what I said. They're against /r/atheism, becuase atheism is filled to the brim with self-righteous, obnoxious teenagers who promote nothing but shit content. Has nothing to do with being a "true atheist".

Again, read Edit 3. Most of the time when jerking they do not make the distinction. A hateful comment in a jerk is still a hateful comment (at least, according to the rules of SRS, who bust jerking comments like it's nobody's business). And those examples were ones I pulled in under a minute. I stopped when I did not want to link any more posts because my inbox was piling up with messages. There were hundreds more.

Dude, I just told you they're majority atheist. All the examples you listed hate on /r/atheism and/or many of the "New Atheism" movement's smug asshole brigadiers. That has nothing to do with hating atheists, just obnoxious people.

You do realize that a lot of people here on /r/atheism are fans of Rebecca Watson, right? Thanks for informing me about this. I'm going to vote for her and tell all of my friends to vote for her too. She's going to be on that panel for sure now, I appreciate your activism promoting her, tee hee! In fact /r/godlesswomen is in the sidebar, and the FAQ itself promotes her...

If you don't see how calling any guy who talks to a girl on the bus a rapist, is bigoted (or how about just in public, since someone is apparently very grumpy and wants to show it)... you're a bigot. And equally not worth my time.

Personal Army? Did you get lost and go to 4Chan? Watson is a bigot. She hates atheists, in her own words. Maybe self-hatred, but still hatred. Bigots mobilizing to host bigoted panels is a relevant interest to the people those bigots target. Is [1] /r/atheism mentioned explicitly on the SXSW Panel page? No. But it is the subject she has written the most about when writing about Reddit. It's not irrelevant.
And yes, if you believe all men are rapists, or even potential rapists, you are someone who hates men. It's not hard. If I said all women are potential type of criminal X, or even potential type of criminal X, that is a hateful, prejudiced statement. Please find me a definition of bigotry that does not include hatred and prejudice.

I, for one, do not care about potential visitors to this subreddit, but about its reputation. I do not want the largest community of atheists on the internet to receive even more hostile, negative and biased publicity simply because we missed the opportunity to stop a rigged game and defend ourselves.

So instead you will organize a campaign to stop out any potential criticism or dissent about your group thus reinforcing pre-existing stereotypes about /r/atheism being the shittiest of the shit default subs.

See, this is my problem exactly with troll subreddits like SRS. You bitch all day about reddit generalizing populations, but you do the exact same This one guy does not at all represent the views of /r/atheism .

In fact, there are no 'views of /r/atheism '. It's just a convenient stereotype you keep around.

Edit: Lots of downvotes, but no one from SRS has anything to say about their double standards? I'm not surprised.

Sure she does. That's the way panels work. If you want to counter her, present a panel with an opposing view. Panels have topics, people go to the topics that interest them. The whole purpose of a forum like that is to welcome ideas.

Uh, you realize that the post is about a public vote about what panels ought to be offered, right? They aren't just handing them out to anyone who walks in. If she gets a panel, someone else - potentially someone with a far more interesting, less divisive and more balanced concept - will be denied having a panel.

I'm well aware. My only point is saying that your votes should be based on your interest in the topics. There's no need to demonize Watson in the process, the whole "Elevatorgate" thing was blown out of proport by the community at large. Watson is a noted skeptic blogger, her views on reddit are her own, she has as much of a right to do a panel as anyone else.

I think it's fair to also vote against something that you think would be actively harmful. In the 2002 French presidential elections, a lot of left wing voters cast ballots for Jacques Chirac, not because they agreed with his politics but because the other choice was the exteme-right Le Pen.

She posts on SRS, which is a hateful, sexist, racist, group. That alone is enough for me to red flag this. The fact she has called in a favor from them to try to get 21,000 votes so that her little panel is guaranteed to happen, makes me absolutely convinced this panel will not only be unfair, unbalanced, and broken, but that it too will also be hateful.

No, panels are meant to be informative. It's not a debate forum. Have you ever attended any type of convention where panels are held? SxSW has over 3.5k panels under consideration right now.

People host panels you'll like. People host panels you don't like. I'm completely fine with Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist giving a panel on how god hates gay people, if he wants to. If the public votes for it and the SxSW administration approves it, I don't really care.

This is a panel, not a debate. Points of view you don't agree with are going to be represented. Attend panels you like, leave feedback on panels you don't like. That's how this works.

It's not a strict dichotomy - while few panels are straight-up Position A vs. Position ~A, any remotely interesting discussion will involve people who disagree about some things. Deliberately stacking the speaker selection towards one side, especially on a controversial issue within the target audience of the event, is at best disingenuous.

Ok, so let the public vote. I'm encouraging people to vote it down, I'm not forcing anyone. I'm doing the exact same thing she is doing, except my aim is fairness, not shameless self-promotion and the propagation of hate. I'm going to enjoy the view up here from my nice moral high ground for a little while longer.

I'm going to enjoy the view up here from my nice moral high ground for a little while longer.

The fact that you want to turn this into a discussion over whether you or Watson has the moral high ground kinda cements my point.

Morality isn't involved here at all. If George Bush wants to host a panel saying all atheists should be burned at the stake, I don't care - that's his prerogative. Sure, vote all you want - if you plan on attending. Even then, I'd suggest voting for panels that interest you, versus against panels whose points of view you disagree with.

Hell, why not just attend her panel and ask her a few simple questions during the QA session that's sure to follow. You want an opposing view to be represented - represent it. No one here is stopping you, as far as I've seen. I think this whole thing is a non-issue.

I only bring it up in the first place because you imply that encouraging people to kill this is somehow inferior to allow her to dishonestly fish her shitty ultra-Feminist rant buddies for votes to make it happen. Dishonest being the key word here. She knows she's got the votes. She posts there. She knows anything anti-Reddit or possibly anti-Reddit will fly. She makes no secret about how anti-Reddit she is. If nobody votes "no", at least I tried. I do not think that kind of dishonest mob tactic should be allowed to go unnoticed by people it will affect; and, given her hateful statements in the past, yes... it will affect people who post here.

Please demonstrate with textual evidence how I hate Rebecca Watson. She actually says she hates people. My position is simply that, if she's going to propose a national event host her own, slanderous and one-sided "panel", I am going to propose we fight it.

Once again: if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I do not hate Watson because I disagree with her and think her opinions are laughable and sometimes dangerous, not to mention hateful.

I'm not advocating censorship. I'm advocating a fair debate. Also, she's rigging the "election" process on the website by calling in 21,000 favors at SRS. Pretty much the definition of sleaze. If that many people want to hear your crappy panel, great. If your only way of forcing people to listen to your paranoid rantings is by employing the most fundamentalist religious group on Reddit, yeah... to me it is responsible to stage an opposition, especially since I am part of the group she/they hate.

btw if you're wondering why everything you say is getting downvoted, its because Rebecca linked this post in her twitter feed. (although I still think you're wrong for getting emotional over her bullshit)

I left because this place became less of a grounds for discussing atheism, and more a place that breeds intolerance and hate towards anyone of faith. It's not a forum, it's a circle jerk. "Oh we're so enlightened compared to those ignorant theists. Grab my cock, brother! To logic and reason we go!"

And that "faces of r/atheism" horse shit. Holy fuck that was embarrassing.

I certainly don't love everything about it myself, but there's a long way from hating a subreddit to being "EXTREMELY anti-/r/atheism", as claimed by OP. The concept of free speech comes in between for one.

I won't dispute you that there are many too-cool atheists on /r/atheism (which is funny, because if they hate it, why do they keep coming here?) but it is one thing to say "Atheists are X" and another thing to say "/r/atheism is X". You'll find if you look through even half those comments that the SRS posters often do not make this distinction.

SRS is not a minority group that is regularly maligned, slandered, and belittled by the majority, and whose very existence is a crime punishable by death in many countries around the world. SRS is an internet message board. False equivalence.

Their most sacred dogma is opposition to the West - they'll defend all manner of horrible sexism coming from the Muslim world since at least they're not white. Atheism is, for now, a mostly Western phenomenon that shows as much scorn towards Islam and other non-Western religions as it does towards Christianity, and they can't have that.

Seriously bro, lie down or take a shower or something. You need to calm down, step away from the keyboard and think about just what exactly preventing criticism of this subreddit says about /r/atheism's integrity.

Ah, Elevatorgate. A case where huge number of misogynistic hypocrites proved their inability to understand a word "no".

As for your Richard Dawkins remark - since when is he a measure of truth? Do you go around saying "this claim is two Dawkinses"? Because you know, the whole "he didn't touch you while in muslim countries women are getting mutilated, so get back to the kitchen" argument is stupid regardless of speaker. And in the end he have shown his total inability to comprehend the issue with "Here's how you escape from an elevator. You press any one of the buttons conveniently provided". Just because someone is good at one debate doesn't make them right by default.

Do you want to shut up everyone who doesn't agree with you vision of atheism and skepticism? Well, fuck you very much. That's all I have for hypocrites like you.

For me, it was when RW personally attacked another young woman on stage at a public event, where that woman had no opportunity to respond. Why? Because she had made a youtube video disagreeing with RW's views.